Preliminary results from Frieze; Swann’s African-American Sale = £3.7m

Sotheby’s Frieze Evening Sales = £69.78m

There’s still a day sale to come on Saturday but the bulk of the sales are over and we’ve got the top ten lists from Phillips and Christie’s below. Next week, we’ll have some auction wrap-ups of the sales and the coverage as well as more detailed reports on the lot-by-lot data for AMMpro subscribers.

Christie’s Frieze Sales = £145m

Christie’s day sale totaled £20.17m

Phillips Frieze sales totaled £31.7m

That’s a 10% rise over last year’s sales cycle where the total was £28.7m.

Robert Colescott, Down in the Dumps: So Long Sweetheart, 1983 $329,000

Swann African-American = $3.767m

With 89% of the lots sold—and 45% of the sold lots receiving prices above the high estimates—Swann’s African-American art sale caps many years of strong growth in this category.

Swann has a been a trailblazer here. Over the last three years, Swann has built the category’s sales from $3.17M to $4.28M to $6.72M. That’s a gain of 35% from 2016 to 2017; and a further rise of 57% from 2017 to 2018.

In yesterday’s sale, the striking figures were not the few top lots that made six figures (listed below.) Although works like Robert Colescott’s Down in the Dumps were estimated at between $35,000 and $50,000, the final price was $329,000. Even the more expected work by Charles White, Nobody Knows My Name #1 was only estimated at between $100,000 and $150,000 before it sold for $485,000. But the strength of this sale came in the lower-value lots that sold for prices $8-10,000 above the previous year’s sale. Value is flooding into this category in the least flashy way.

1. Charles White, Nobody Knows My Name #1, 1965  $485,000
2. Robert Colescott, Down in the Dumps: So Long Sweetheart, 1983 $329,000
3. Eldzier Cortor, Sea of Time, 1945  $245,000
4. Stanley Whitney, Radical Openness, 1991 $185,000
5. Beauford Delaney, Untitled (African Figure), 1968 $173,000
6. Hughie Lee-Smith, Man with Balloons, 1960  $149,000
7. Sam Gilliam, Blood Legacy, 1983  $100,000
8. Noah Purifoy, Untitled (66 Signs of Neon), circa 1966 $81,250
9. Hughie Lee-Smith, End of Act One, 1987   $81,250
10. William H. Johnson, On a John Brown Flight, circa 1964 $75,000